‘Game of Thrones’ Premiere Crashes GetGlue, Gets 60,000 Comments

The season 2 premiere of HBO’s popular TV show Game of Thrones had so many social media users buzzing last night that it caused the social networking site Get Glue to temporarily crash.

Game of Thrones — a medieval fantasy show based on “A Song of Ice and Fire,” a series of seven fantasy novels — raked in a high level of check-ins on Get Glue not only the night of the show, but in the days leading up to the premiere.

About 50,000 people checked-in to GetGlue on Sunday to let friends know they were watching the show. GetGlue, which rewards its users with points that can be redeemed for virtual and physical stickers and discounts from entertainment companies, experienced so much traffic during that time that its servers were briefly down.

“We also had over 90,000 check-ins for the week leading up to the premiere,” a GetGlue spokesperson told Mashable, noting that the first episode of Game of Thrones last year brought in just 9,000 check-ins on.

To put the 50,000 check-ins into context, the highly-anticipated return of Mad Men last week brought in 22,000 check-ins. Meanwhile, the season 2 premiere of The Walking Dead had 43,000 and the 2011 season premiere of True Blood had 38,000 check ins.

“We knew it would be a big night, but we didn’t know how big,” the spokesperson added.

Those that used the site were also highly active on Twitter. About 50% of the tweets that said
Watching Game of Thrones” came from GetGlue.

According to social TV analytics provider Bluefin Labs, the premiere generated a total of about 60,000 comments across all social networking sites. About 54% of that activity was conducted by men, while 46% were women.

Meanwhile, about 18% of the sentiment analysis was positive and 76% was neutral. Just 6% was negative.

How do you use social media while watching TV? Let us know in the comments.